Mortal Danger

detectives reported that they had found the body of a Jane Doe, but that victim turned out to be a sixteen-year-old local girl.
    Weeks passed with no sign of Laura Baylis. And then, on October 14, her whereabouts were finally, tragically, discovered.
    Alva Marsh,* who owned several properties in the neighborhood, stopped to check on a vacant house heowned in the 6300 block of Beacon Avenue. The run-down residence was located only a mile from the 7-Eleven where Laura Baylis vanished.
    Marsh had been inside the house a few times in recent weeks and he’d noticed a strange, repugnant odor he couldn’t identify. On this October day, he had decided to search for the source of the nauseating smell.
    And he had come upon a body in a closet beneath the stairs leading to the basement. It appeared to be that of a woman. She was wearing blue jeans.
    Shocked, Marsh ran up the stairs and headed for the nearest phone to call police.
    It was shortly after noon when homicide detectives Duane Homan and Mike Tando, and their sergeant, Craig Vandeputte, were summoned on a “questionable death” call. When they viewed the victim and noted the clothing she wore, they recognized that it was identical to the garments worn by the missing girl in the case Lieutenant Holter and Detectives Trettevik and Stewart were working in the Robbery Unit. Accordingly, they asked that Trettevik and Stewart respond to the scene.
    It was a warm Indian summer day with no hint of rain as the crew of investigators moved through the vacant house. Alva Marsh said that the house had been boarded up for at least two years but that he had had problems with people breaking in and vandalizing. He had been about to begin cleaning up the premises and the yard when he discovered the body.
    The house was a three-story frame structure, full of clutter. The entrance to the basement was on the south side of the house, accessible by four steps from the yard. Allthe basement windows were boarded up and intact, but the hasp on the basement door lock had been pried from the frame. There was no artificial light at all in the cellar and the detectives brought in auxiliary lighting to augment the thin gray rays that leaked through the boarded windows.
    Now they could see streaks of blood on the outside of the closet door. The woman’s body sat slumped over just inside. The young woman had been dead for some time; she still wore the clothes Jack Atkins had told them she wore as he walked her to her bus on Sunday: blue jeans, a blue shirt, and a blue ski jacket with a red lining. Her jeans were pulled down below her buttocks and her other clothing yanked over her head. She appeared to have been stabbed, but the decomposing body would require an autopsy to try to verify time and cause of death.
    They walked up the steps to search the upper floors of the abandoned house, almost feeling the presence of ghostly spirits from its past and, now, from its present.
    There was some graffiti sprayed on walls and other clutter that indicated someone had been using the old house as a hangout. They also found spots where someone had tried to torch the house. It had been a failed attempt; the little piles of paper and boards were scorched, but then any flames had dissipated.
    The empty house should have gone up in a major conflagration. It was full of the debris of what looked like fifty years or more. Former tenants or owners—or maybe trespassers—had left a lot behind: broken furniture, yellowed newspapers, food wrappers, garbage.
    But none of the trash littering the upper floors appeared to have any immediate connection to the dead woman. Insome areas, the floors were two or three feet deep with detritus; to sift through it all thoroughly would take weeks—even months.
    Deputies from the medical examiner’s office removed the body from its lonely, cluttered tomb and transported it downtown to await autopsy. Detectives placed police locks on the doors as they ended the first day’s probe into what now could be called a homicide.
    Although it seemed that the body found was surely that of Laura Baylis, dental records would be necessary to make absolute identification. And those would have to come all the way from England.
    Early the next morning, Detectives Duane Homan, Mike Tando, and Larry Stewart returned to the vacant house to continue processing it. This time, they were accompanied by Jean Battista, a fingerprint expert. They dusted every inch of the basement for latent prints but